Campground housekeeping runs on four cleaning states: needs cleaning, in progress, inspected and clean. At checkout the site types you choose mark themselves needs cleaning, so cabins and glamping units land on the daily list and RV sites stay off it. The list sorts by the next arrival, and a site with an open work order carries that on its row.
It is 11:04 on a Tuesday in July. Six sites went empty this morning: two cabins, three RV sites and the safari tent. Four of them have someone arriving this afternoon, the earliest at 2:30. One cleaner is on today and the lead is walking behind her. Nobody is confused yet, and by 1:00 somebody will be.
Most parks run this on a whiteboard, a printed departure list, or the memory of whoever is on. All three work fine until the person holding them walks away. The office takes a call about site 22, the cleaner is at A4, and the answer to a simple question, is A2 ready, takes a radio call and a guess.
What are the four cleaning states for?
A site carries one of four states: needs cleaning, in progress, inspected, clean. That is it. The value is not the labels, it is that they are on the site itself rather than in a person, so the front desk and the crew are reading the same thing without talking to each other.
Needs cleaning means nobody has started. In progress means someone did, and their name is on it. Inspected means the lead walked it after the cleaner. Clean means it is ready for the person arriving at 2:30.
Can checkout start the cleaning list for you?
Cabins and glamping units get cleaned on every turn without anyone deciding. That is a rule, so it can be a setting: when the guest checks out, the site marks itself needs cleaning. RV sites usually are not on that cycle, so they stay out of it and read clean unless somebody puts them on the list by hand.
That is set per site type, which matters more than it sounds. A park with 90 RV sites, four cabins and two safari tents wants a list six items long on a turn day, not 96.
Does the order of the list matter?
The daily list sorts by the next arrival, so the site with someone coming at 2:30 sits above the one with nobody coming tonight. A cleaner working top to bottom is working the day in the order the day needs, without a conversation about it.
What about a site that is clean but broken?
Site 18 is clean and still cannot take the arrival, because the spigot is leaking and there is a work order open on it. On the housekeeping list, that shows on the row. The cleaner does not walk out there for nothing, and the front desk does not promise it to anybody.
The site that sat dirty until 4 p.m. never shows up on a report. The guest who waited by the office remembers it, the cleaner remembers it, and by Friday nobody can say which site it was.
Do you have to use the inspection step?
Some parks have a lead who walks every cabin behind the cleaner. Some do not, and adding a step they will never use is how software starts getting ignored. If you turn the inspection step off, in progress goes straight to clean.
If you do not track cleaning states at all, the state can be hidden park-wide and the whole thing goes quiet. That is worth knowing before you set anything up: you are not committing your crew to a process, you are choosing which parts of one you want.
Worth deciding before the season
- Which site types mark themselves needs cleaning at checkout, and which stay off the list.
- Whether a lead inspects behind the cleaner, or in progress goes straight to clean.
- Who is allowed to advance a site, and who is only reading it.
- What the crew does with a site that is clean but has an open work order on it.